Settle The Score
by orangefanfic
Summary: In this short fiction piece based on Orange Is The New Black, several of the inmates at Litchfield Correctional Facility act on long-gestating thoughts and desires. This story has four parts and combines some of our other previous chapters, so some readers may be familiar with some sections.
1. Part I

Fluorescent lights, harsh and cold. Tiffany's eyes fluttered open and right away she recognized the sight, the hum of the machines, and the sickening, sterile smell.

The hospital. Only this time, she wasn't here to send a little one up to heaven. The pain pulsing through her scull said she was here for something else. She leaned her head back and let the light dance on her eyelids, imagining it was the glorious white light of her Lord and Savior calling her home.

Stretched out lazily, one leg draped over the edge of the bed and dangling, Tiffany couldn't help but grin at the thought of meeting the Savior face to face. She would see her babies, all those babies she had given up to the doctor's knife in clinic after clinic. She'd get her robe and halo, praise music and good food to eat. She had earned it. It took more than two hands to count all the lost souls who had listened to Tiffany preach the Gospel inside the walls of the Litch, the girls just like her who had put down the pipe and turned their lives over to Christ, to sin no more. In prison, she wasn't just a raggedy meth head. She was a servant of the Most High God.

Tiffany had only a vague recollection of how she'd ended up in the hospital. Last she remembered, she'd been on stage gazing into the piercing spotlight as the Christmas angel, a role she was meant to play. All eyes had been glued to her, looking to her to spread the Gospel just like during Bible study.

"Fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be unto all people," she recited the words aloud, and felt a clicking in her jaw.

Her whole head was cloudy, half numb and half pain, but she could for sure feel something strange in her mouth. A fullness, like when they used to play chubby bunny as kids. They never had marshmallows, so they'd use whatever they could find in the sticks that was small enough, stuff it into their jowls and shout until they could make their voices echo. She hadn't played that game in years.

Out of the corner of Tiffany's eye she spotted a bedpan. She twisted her body towards it and there in the reflection, she saw. Her face was bruised and healing. But the big thing, the shocking thing, was that the dark, rotten stumps of decay she had whittled down with years of meth use were gone and in their place, a brand new set of pearly whites more perfect than Tiffany had ever seen. She clamped her jaws tight and fingered them. The teeth were real. There could only be one explanation: God had seen all the hard work she'd been doing on His behalf, winning souls for His kingdom, and somehow decided to bring her reward early. He'd made her mouth holy so that she could speak the Gospel.

It wasn't until Tiffany got back to the Litch that she heard the full story. At first, Leanne and the others just stared at her, glassy-eyed, saying the teeth made her look like somebody out of a magazine, somebody they didn't feel proper around. But when Tiffany threatened to strike them all down with the power of the Most High God, they realized that she was the same old _Tucky_.

They said it was a fight that had put her in the hospital, that she hadn't even won, and that the girls they all hated – the blonde and the one with the glasses – were at fault. The blonde, that college educated priss who thought she was better than everybody, was the one who had beaten Tiffany up, and her four-eyed girlfriend had taken the hit and was put in SHU. Blondie had gotten away scot-free and now everybody was laughing, saying "Pennsatucky was asking for it."

The news formed a knot in the pit of Tiffany's stomach that sent her running for the toilet. She let her guts explode into the bowl, overcome with the feeling that no one in prison respected her anymore. And in here, respect was everything. She wiped her mouth at the sink and stared at her pearly whites in the dingy mirror. These teeth weren't a blessing, she realized; they were proof that Satan himself had struck her down. She wanted to rip every one of them out of her mouth.

There was only one way to make this right. Tiffany had to go find the blonde, and she had to pry every tooth out of her mouth to make it even.

But first, she needed a weapon.


	2. Part II

"You better stay out of this kitchen, unless you want to feel the wrong side of a broom up your bony ass," Taystee warned as she shooed Pennsatucky out from the pantry. "I don't know what you're looking for, but you won't find it here."

It had only been a few weeks since Taystee had taken over the kitchen, but various inmates had already tried her in various ways – asking for extra servings at lunch, looking to smuggle in drugs, or trying to steal different items from the kitchen for their own private, and usually sinister, purposes. Taystee wasn't having it. Running the kitchen was the cushiest job in prison, even better than sorting books in the library, and she wasn't giving it up for anybody

A few weeks in, and she was already sashaying around like she owned the place. From the time everybody woke up til time to put head back to pillow, she had all manner of delicious aromas wafting through the air, making the others bless the day that both Red and Gloria mysteriously turned up with debilitating cases of food poisoning. _About damn time a sista got in front of this oven,_ she thought.

Today they'd be having cobbler. A genius idea, for it was dirt cheap to make and only required four ingredients - government canned peaches, Bisquick, cinnamon, and a whole lot of sugar. Well, five ingredients if you counted Taystee's secret, a dash of something extra that she wouldn't reveal to anyone except Chang, which was only because Chang worked in the commissary and could get it on the sly.

So now the whole kitchen felt hot and sticky and smelled like heaven as Taystee readied her dish. As she let it bake, her glorious singing voice echoed, escaped the barred windows, and drifted to the skies.

"I'm a grown woman, I can do whatever I want," she belted out the Beyonce anthem with the power of Aretha. "I'm a grown woman…"

_You sure are_, Poussey thought to herself as she dragged a sopping wet mop over the floors.

Her ace boon coon had done Poussey a hell of a favor by putting her on kitchen staff as soon as Taystee was appointed head cook. Now it was just the two of them idling in the space between lunch and dinner, and it would be at least another hour before the crowd came back to demand the last meal of the day. But Poussey was already starving.

"Look at you, getting all Barefoot Contessa. Smells better than Thanksgiving in here," she announced with a crooked smile.

As Taystee pulled her dish from the oven, Poussey let the mop fall into a corner and sidled over, stepping through suds without care. It flew in the face of her entire upbringing to dirty a freshly mopped floor. But right now, she wasn't a military brat. She was a woman.

The golden brown surface of the cobbler hissed and sputtered, overpowering them both with its scent. It was perfect. Taystee fanned her arm over it a few times to make it cool, then turned, startled to find her friend right behind her.

"Lemme taste it," the words trickled from Poussey's mouth barely above a whisper.

"You got to let it cool first, dumbass," Taystee explained as if it was common sense.

"Please?"

Poussey's large dark eyes were fixed on Taystee with an expression she didn't recognize. A moment of quiet passed between them. Taystee turned and fished out a bit of the moist, golden crust between a fork and her index finger and brought it to Poussey's lips. She watched Poussey's mouth devour it, then her fingers.

_Funny_, Taystee thought. In all the time they'd been locked up together she'd never wondered, never even considered, that she and Poussey would be more than friends.

But here they were.


	3. Part III

One red drop, then another, gathered on the ground. 10-year-old Marcus watched his own blood soak into the concrete as his father stood over him, right hand twitching, ready to strike another blow.

"Go back."

Marcus flinched at the sound of his dad's voice.

"No son of mine is running from anybody, hear? That's a coward, not a man."

_A man._ It didn't sound right to Marcus. He couldn't yet name this feeling that came whenever somebody told him how a man ought to think, speak, and act. He only knew that he didn't feel like one, that he felt instead like a rodeo clown - always performing, and trying his best to make it out of the ring in one piece.

This was long before he would make his outsides match his insides, before he even knew that he could. This was the '80s, and nobody used the word _trans_. He was just a scrawny kid that got by on being smart and staying out of the way.

Until today. Today a bloated sack of horseshit from the seventh grade decided to call Marcus a _fag_ and take his last piece of lunch money. And today his father decided to step outside for a cigarette at the precise moment that Marcus took off running from said sack of horseshit. And because it was a disgrace for a man to ever turn tail and run, it was out of a deep sense of shame that Marcus' father had dragged him by the collar back into the street and demanded that he go face that bully, or else.

"But he's bigger. He can beat me," Marcus reasoned, choking back tears to keep from making things worse.

"Better him than me. That's the choice - either go deal with him or stay here and deal with me. Either way, you're gonna fight."

The memory might have made Sophia angry, but instead she felt grateful. Right or wrong, back then was the first time she felt truly powerful, marching down the street on her father's orders carrying a stray piece of plywood, ready to make sure everyone knew that _fags_ could fight and that no one would ever steal from her again.

This was how she learned that she could have whatever she wanted in life – anything - and nobody had the right to take it away. This was what gave her the nerve to get the operation that would turn Marcus into Sophia. And this was why, when Sophia found that Appalachian meth head Pennsatucky creeping into her personal beauty supply looking for things to steal, she was forced to bash the girl's head in on general principle.

"I didn't raise no sissy. Don't let anybody make you afraid," Sophia could hear her father's words ringing in her head as raw adrenaline shot through her body, turning to blows.

It took three guards to pull Sophia off Pennsatucky and when they did, her brand new teeth couldn't even be seen for all the blood. The others were stunned. They thought Sophia's aggression had gone into the surgeon's dumpster along with her testes. True, she had given up everything for the right to be called a lady and most of the time, she acted like one. But sometimes you had to jump bad in order to teach a lesson.

It would be two weeks in the SHU for Sophia. But it wasn't so bad. She strolled all the way there with head held high, and when she got to confinement she was surprised to find Alex Vause in the neighboring cell. If they had to be in SHU, at least they had their self-respect and each other as company.


	4. Part IV

A slight frame, glowing chestnut skin and almond eyes that seemed to look straight through to your soul. A hush fell over the Litch as Ms. Lauryn Hill, the new inmate, drifted in. She had been a big deal on the outside. Fame. Controversy. Multiple Grammys. Rumors swirled about why she was there but no one seemed to know for sure. Between the gossip and what they could piece together from outdated newspapers in the library, they figured she had been some kind of social misfit.

Poussey supposed that Ms. Hill had killed someone. "Celebrities don't just get locked up for regular shit," she reasoned as Taystee massaged her scalp with Jam gel and a wet brush. "She must have done something really foul to be up in here with the rest of you fools."

Even inside prison, Hill kept a strict schedule: sunrise meditation with Yoga Jones, followed by a light vegan breakfast of grapes and contraband raw almonds, then a stroll through the yard. Most of the others couldn't bring themselves to speak to her directly, but quietly trailed her every step hoping to catch a hint of the raspy alto voice that had made her a star. Even Taystee was rendered speechless in her presence and once, when they made direct eye contact, Taystee simply burst into tears.

"_Miseducation_ is everything," explained Black Cindy, who had first discovered Hill's album when she found it lodged in the CD deck of a Camry she once boosted. _Ex-Factor _became the anthem of brokenhearted girls everywhere and had truly changed her life.

Ms. Hill rarely spoke, but when she did it was always deep philosophical jargon about "dialectic metaphysicality" or "psychological recidivism." This only added to her charm. She was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

She amassed a devoted following whom she recruited to lend background vocals to her first solo album in 15 years, the entirety of which she recorded in a single afternoon while sitting on the toilet. She called it, _My Transcendental Aura is Fundamentally and Perennially Conscious of Why the Caged Bird Harmonizes its Pain._ Standing in a circle, hands clasped, their voices resonating through the brilliant acoustics of the bathroom, they were one. No one minded that they wouldn't get paid, since one hundred percent of the proceeds already belonged to Hill's label, Sony. Flaca claimed, smugly, that this was exactly how Morrissey had gotten started.

"I don't see what the big attraction is," Red grumbled in between slurps of her Cup Noodles.

Ousted from the kitchen, stuck in her bunk nursing her food sickness, she was miserable, and the arrival of Hill only made it worse. Red wasn't fond of the special treatment this new inmate got - that Hill could keep and play an acoustic guitar, and get extended visiting hours, and would sometimes wear a wrap skirt over her orange jumper without any repercussions at all. Within a week, Hill had successfully staged a sit-in to raise inmates' wages to an unprecedented 35 cents an hour, even though Hill herself refused to engage in prison work.

"That's too much power for one woman to have," snapped Red, failing to see the irony in her own statement.

Piper was thrilled. She found an unlikely friend in her new bunkmate, as the two shared a love of good books and a similar disregard for authority. Piper learned that during her self-imposed exile from society, Hill had read the entire collected works of Pablo Neruda and that she too wrote only in green ink so that her words evoked _esperanza_. The two spent hours discussing philosophy, politics, activism, and religion as they played in each other's hair. Their debates on the paradox of self and how to achieve true harmony lingered into the wee hours of the night.

It was during one of these chats that Piper had a deep revelation, about her own selfishness. When Hill pointed out that Piper's position as a privileged, coddled, traditionally educated blonde had severely skewed her worldview to the detriment of her moral compass, the scales fell from Piper's eyes.

"Alex was right," Piper realized. "I am a naive asshole."

It was true. Alex had sacrificially taken the fall for Piper's fight with Pennsatucky. As Piper had knelt in the snow, in shock, still gripping the bloody screwdriver, Alex was there. Alex had helped her up, dried her tears, and pulled the weapon from her hand. And when a guard discovered them both outside, Alex didn't dime Piper out.

Piper couldn't tell if it was true love or stupidity that caused Alex to come running in haste every time she was in trouble. Maybe it didn't matter. But the choice had cost Alex hard time in the SHU, and when she came back, her eyes were hollow. Piper reasoned that there was no way to show her gratefulness, and no way to make amends, so she didn't say anything.

But here she was, lying in bed across from the wisdom of Ms. Hill, and suddenly it all made sense.

"It only takes a drop of purity to clean a cesspool," Hill whispered.

"It's true," Piper answered. "I have to make this right."

Piper felt lighter as she drifted off to sleep, determined to make peace with Alex in the morning. But her relief was short-lived, for the next day Piper's new bunkmate spit in a guard's face for failing to address her as "Ms." and was quickly transferred to another facility.

Let any of the inmates tell it, the guard deserved what he got.

But now Piper questioned everything. Maybe Ms. Hill wasn't as wise as she had thought. As Piper's eyes drifted across the bunks and settled on Alex, she struggled with what to do next.


End file.
